Charlotte Wood - Author

Author Charlotte Wood is the author of nine brilliant books. Throughout her career, she  has most generously shared her own research and life-long investigations into how stories are made. She has even been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant service to literature.

Her latest novel Stone Yard Devotional has just been released to a great critical reception and before that, her novel The Weekend was an international bestseller, winning both the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award.

“To create is to defy emptiness."

... is just one of many profound things that Charlotte says in her non-fiction book The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience & the Inner-Life. It is a must read for anyone who has a creative bone in their body. 

True to form, Charlotte most generously shares her process and challenges with us.

We HEART Charlotte Wood.

Transcript

Charlotte Wood 
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Courtney: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous listeners. Welcome to, are you still working? How to take your creative ideas seriously. I'm Courtney Collins, and this is episode four, an interview with author Charlotte Wood. To create is to defy emptiness. This is just one of many profound things that Charlotte says in her book, The Luminous Solution Creativity, Resilience, and the Inner Life.

My friend, the playwright Mary Anne Butler, was so struck by the truth of this quote, she's actually going to get it tattooed on her wrist. I'll admit, it was hard not to fangirl Charlotte Wood when I met her. She's the author of nine brilliant books, and throughout her career, she has just most generously shared her research and lifelong investigations into how stories are made.

She has been appointed a member of the Order of Australia for her significant [00:01:00] service to literature. Her latest novel, Stoneyard Devotional, has just been released to great critical reception. And before that, her novel The Weekend was an international bestseller, winning both the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award.

We spoke on Gadigal country in Sydney's inner west, before Stoneyard Devotional was released.

Charlotte Wood, what are you working on at the moment?

Charlotte: I am editing a novel that's coming out at the end of the year and it's called Stoneyard Devotional,

Courtney: Fantastic. 

Charlotte: I'm up to the copy editing stage. Which I really like because someone else is telling me what to do and I just go, yes, yes, yes.

Courtney: So in what sounds like a really challenging year of your life, last year you delivered a new book. was that process helpful or a support or would you have preferred to have just left it for another time?

Charlotte: it was such an [00:02:00] interesting year. So in brief, my older sister got breast cancer then told all of her sisters to scurry to the mammogram place, which we did.

And then two more of us got breast cancer. So within six weeks there were three out of four of us, three out of four girls. And then my brother then had to go home, get tested for breast cancer. Anyway, it turned out there was bizarrely no genetic stuff involved and the others are fine, but, it was incredibly stressful.

Courtney: yes, 

Charlotte: so I knew Bernie, my older sister had this very hard road ahead of her and I had gone and had my test and heard nothing. So I thought, great. And then I was working on my book.
I was away at, at this house on the Central Coast that we rent. And I was working away there, and I just finally, after it felt like a lot of false starts on this book that I'd started writing, before the pandemic and just felt like I, I was always starting it and getting [00:03:00] nowhere. But anyway, I just went into one of those, you know, immersive kind of frenzies of not working fast, but working very deeply and steadily. And I got to the end of the draft and that was such a relief that I knew then that I had a book, which I really didn't know until that point, everything was sort of there, ready to be revised. I had a whole sort of shape, I guess. It was 10.30 in the morning where I kind of wrote this last bit and thought, yeah, that's it. I think that's it. Oh my God, I finally got this draft. Hallelujah. Then I left there to go and do some shopping.
While I was at the grocery store, I got the call from the breast screening people saying, just wondering if you could come back in for another thing. After that my brain went dead and you know, there's a whole process of weeks and waiting and all of that, but I just think, thank God I had that done because I don't think I would've been able to go back to [00:04:00] it with any focus. So I didn't work on it for really months and months while I had surgery and radiation and whatever, and helping my sisters with their hideous, chemotherapy.

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte: I could hardly read, let alone write, you know? But I had, you know, these little glimpses of connection to life, one of which was a wonderful group of writers. I'd just started this course called 10 Experiments Online, and you, Courtney, were in that group and turning up to that little monthly meeting for me was really, , such a salve, really. it was a connection to my working life and my creative life that had otherwise disappeared.

Courtney: Is there a point that you recall given, there are so many available exits when you're an in, intelligent, thoughtful person. There are many career possibilities available to you. Did you ever just dig in your heels and go, this is my work, this is my world, whatever it takes now, [00:05:00] or what, what was, was there a moment like that?

Charlotte: I don't know that there was a moment, but I knew how badly I wanted it. And I didn't start writing until I was 30. Really. I mean, I'd done a bit of writing at university. and I loved it, but I wasn't committed to it. You know, I was sort of like, oh, that's great, and when I get time I'll do some. And I was working in journalism you know, media relations and stuff, and that was all kind of pleasurable and easy. And, I could get money from doing that, which I was not gonna get from writing. I knew that, you know, but something, well, my mother died when I was 29 of cancer. and our father also died young of cancer. So this sort of huge, ogre of cancer was, I mean, it's kind of interesting now, the thing happened, you know, that great fear that we could never even turn to face because it was [00:06:00] so, scary then happened. Yeah. And we're all here and it's gonna be fine,

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte: at least for the meantime. so my mom died and that was one of those moments where, where, Life divides really clearly into things that matter, things that don't matter.

And I knew really deeply in my gut that writing suddenly mattered almost more than anything to me, and I committed. That's when I thought, I'm gonna write and I'm gonna work, and I'm gonna change other things in my life in order to make room for this. And I became happier when I wrote, not because what I was writing made me happy or, but you know, it's that thing of I started to know who I was and who I was, was a person who needed writing in order to express myself.

I wasn't writing about my mother, but [00:07:00] you know, there's that Flaubert thing. I think he said fiction is a response to a deep and always hidden wound. Well, my wound wasn't at all hidden to me, but I did feel like writing was a place to take all the, all the big stuff. Well, you can't go around saying that stuff to your friends all day.

You know, like, and I was one of those young women whose boyfriends always thought you're just way too intense and I remember when I read, Edna O'Brien saying, people write fiction because, or become writers because they have an intensity of feeling that normal life cannot accommodate. And that was me. And so that intensity of feeling, had somewhere to go where it wasn't gonna screw up all the rest of my life. you know, and the hypersensitivity and the kind of anxiety and all of that, all of that sort of could either be poured into the work or was settled by the act of working.

So I knew, from when I really [00:08:00] committed that that's what I wanted to do. And.

then I never really thought about, well maybe once or twice I thought about stopping. Actually with The Weekend was a time when I thought I can't do this anymore.

Courtney: Why?

Charlotte: I think I was just bone weary to be honest, and I reached a really big block in the work and I just, I think I've always had the fear that I'll have a book die on me. You know, it happens all the time. you know, lots of writers have those books in the second drawer, bottom drawer, wherever it goes. But I had never had that. Every book that I had written, was published. And, partly that's because I am just extremely slow. I have one idea at a time that takes forever to work out. I mean, I don't think I'm slow in terms of publishing, but I'm slow in thinking. whereas I think some people who, you know, put books away they've got another idea and they wanna go with it.

I'm like, I don't have any other ideas. But with The Weekend, I just reached a point where I. [00:09:00] Move forward with the book. I was really tired. the natural way of things. My previous novel had been this kind of really shock, success in terms of, sales and attention and whatever. and that meant that I did a lot of talking, much more than I had about any other book. it was published internationally. It it took me, to Europe for, you know, tiny baby mini Not-really-book-tour. And I think I was tired. I was just, I hadn't stepped away from any work for, you know, a while.

But I remember I did have a period of thinking. this is sick, this life, this, why do people do this? It was lonely. I'd been away to work by myself, which I do quite a lot.

At that time I thought, this is really sick. Why are you separating yourself from the world to be miserable? 

It was weird. I'd never felt it before and I've never felt it since that there was something wrong. 

People who did this. and I just thought, okay, I'm out of here. I thought, I'm gonna give it [00:10:00] six months give myself six months off.

And I did. And I, but I also thought maybe this is it. Maybe I'm not gonna do any more work. I don't, you know, it's hard to know how seriously it felt very serious at the time. and I stopped working and that was the first time I'd ever
completely stopped. and what I mean is I, I didn't think about it. Mm-hmm. You know, loads of other times I, I'd had to stop to earn money or for, you know, whatever things that just go on in your life.
But this was, no, I'm not even gonna, I'm not gonna take notes. I'm not gonna notice anything in the world to do with my book. I'm just going to vacate the book in every way.
And I did, and I just did all that. I did a bit of teaching. I did a bit of traveling it was kind of great in a way. All those things that never get done, like the roof that leaks every now and again. It's like, ah, yeah, I'll get to that. Or, you know, the stinky cupboard under the sink.

Or people I hadn't paid proper attention to for a long [00:11:00] time, just because daily life, you know, takes over and when you're working, fitting everything in is so difficult. So I had six months of just sort of wandering around doing what I wanted. It was awesome.

Courtney: Yeah.

Charlotte: And then eventually I just felt that pull back to it, you know? And I'm kind of gesturing to my gut as I'm saying that, it's almost umbilical or something. That sense of, I've gotta go back now because. I don't know. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's a kind of of mental nausea or something when you are not with it. And then when I went back to it, I was just pushing shit uphill Again, nothing was happening, but it was only about a week or something into that. And I went downstairs and said to Sean, my partner, this, this is terrible. It's terrible. It's really just crap. And he said, oh, welcome back to work. he said, it is always like that, so just get on with it.

And then, you know, within a week or so, I had a breakthrough So [00:12:00] the problem that I had at the time was the weekend is about, three women friends in their seventies. Their other friend has died and they're at her beach house. sort of packing up, packing it up for sale.

But at the point that I had reached, I had three women in a beach house for no reason, they didn't even have a dead friend. standing in the shower, the bit of the wall that I was looking at when it came to me, it's like, no, it's not just our beach house, it's their dead friend's beach house.

So then there was a driver for the whole thing. yeah. My problem before that was I've got these women being really narky with each other in a beach house. Why the hell are they there if they're so narky? So I've suddenly had a reason for them to be there together and to, to kind of be able to keep them there scratching up against each other for a couple of days.

But it was that, that relief that you feel when you go, oh my God, thank fuck there is a reason for all this stuff I've been doing, [00:13:00] but you don't know. And you know, trusting that instinct.

It's so hard, but it's the only way I think.

Courtney: So in that quandary or that process, it, it sounds like consciously or unconsciously, you ask the question, what are, what are they even doing there?

Yeah. 

The the idea, the answer comes to you, it's on the wall.

Charlotte: Yeah, but I'd been asking that question for months, and months before. You know, it wasn't like that was the first

Courtney: you just posed it.

Charlotte: Yeah, and I was, I couldn't answer it before. 

Courtney: So what changed? 

Charlotte: I don't know. I think letting go helped a lot.

Courtney: Can you describe what that is for you? The, you know, we hear this just let go. The ideas will come. Like what does it even feel like to do that? It sounds awful. . It sounds terrifying. Yeah,

Charlotte: it's basically done out of desperation in my case. It's not, it's like at that point you have no other choice. So I, you know, I've always had this tussle between, I [00:14:00] think in the luminous solution, I call it the, the sort of, tension between the grit and the gift and the grit is your ass on the chair. Work, really work. And, you know, discipline, routine order. Turning up to the desk when you don't feel like it, which is all the time, putting words down the page that are crap, which is all the time, and just keeping going, plodding along. but the gift is what happens when you do the, the grit stuff.

You know, there's that saying, visions come to prepared spirits.

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte: And I think it was a scientist actually who said that, that, phrase was told to me by, David Roach, a friend who's a screenwriter, and it means if you're not there doing the work, the gift won't come. But what I'm more and more interested in is letting go of the grit a little bit, like still turning up, but not having the, I guess it's a tonal thing in a way, still being disciplined, still having all of that commitment and, I mean, I just know from [00:15:00] experience that hard work is what gets it done. But what I feel now and have been sort of increasingly since the natural way of things, I guess I'm keen on not trying to control it you know, it's like I've got my hands in claw shapes here while I'm talking to you, and I think for a long time. 

Charlotte: That's all I had really was just the iron will and learning my craft as a kind of narrative. writer, you know, that was very comforting for a long time. Just learning how to write a story, I sort of hesitate to say plot because I'm not that interested in plot, but I am interested in narrative tension, getting the pages turning. The challenge and the interest for me now is in being much less controlling about narrative tension, leaving it much looser, more fragmented, leaving bigger gaps. and we'll see if that works. You know, That's what I love to read as a reader.
But you know, there's, there's a sort of anxiety [00:16:00] that's evident in a manuscript that's over controlled. I think it's the writer going, I can't afford for you to think anything else other than what I want you to think or see or understand about this book. So what I'm interested in now . Just stepping back, you know, Amanda, Laurie talks about just getting out of your own way.

Courtney: that sense of trusting that the work will reveal itself to you.

Charlotte: and it's a bit more sort of woowoo than I used to feel, butI really believe it that a book will tell you how to write it if you listen, if you let go of the need to control it. Doesn't mean it's gonna be easy. It can be harder to write when you have to kind of obey the book, which sounds completely ridiculous. I know.

Courtney: What do you do physically or, even to prepare yourself, kind of mentally or spiritually to be in that space of, accepting the grit and the gift.

Charlotte: I like to be quiet. and you know, it's [00:17:00] kind of weird. This last year has been like another lockdown. I hated lockdown. I was terrified.
And, you know, at the height of the pandemic, I couldn't work then. I was way too anxious and stressed out, and I hated lockdown. But last year was kind of like a voluntary lockdown in a way. in that my world just came to a very small circle and I had this of, you know, it sounds kind of awful, but in some way, quite liberating, sense of I don't have to do anything I don't wanna do. And everybody lets you in that scenario. I just saw who I wanted to see but I knew that in order to get through. what we had to get through as a family. no extraneous things could be allowed. So it was kind of beautiful in lots of ways. The, the sort of burning off of all the unnecessary stuff. Just little mini bullshit anxieties that someone like me walks around the world with like, you know, did I say the wrong thing? Did they like me? Oh, I should've haven't got back to them, blah, blah, blah. [00:18:00] And oh, they're gonna be annoyed. All that's gone. You know, much bigger anxieties. Sure take their place, but there's something very restful about that. So this is like the kind of ideal writing state, I suppose would be, I go for a morning walk for an hour.
I say this also being clear that I don't do this all the time. Like

Courtney: yeah, we're talking ideal.

Charlotte: And it's like, why do I not do this all the time? so I did this morning, it was great. I get up sort of preferably like five 30, it takes me about two hours to wake up properly.

I need a lot of coffee in the morning and then I go for a walk and then get to the desk. like eight 30 maybe, and then settle in to, you know, a good. Four or five hours maybe. in the first draft that kind of generative period I used to be very, very, strict a thousand words a day with this latest book, Couldn't and didn't, and it was much slower and smaller, but I was still at, at the desk for that amount of time. I like to have a lot of time on my own or at least, yeah. Not a big social time.

Charlotte: And [00:19:00] lately I've been thinking about kind of subtraction as a, modus operandi, I guess. Interesting. And the biggest thing to subtract is the online world. I was on Twitter for like nine years and I think I probably kind of met you on Twitter I quit that in 2016 after Trump was elected. I'm like, I can't even bear this. And also, I couldn't bear myself on social media. That was the main thing. I was just sick of my kind of persona on Twitter particularly. Yeah, I do have an Instagram account and I really love it, but I'm much more judicious about

Courtney: yeah,

Charlotte: how much I'm on there what I really hate and, and have done and still do occasionally too much - mindless scrolling. That just makes you feel kind of sick in the end. You know? It's like you've had too much sugar there's no nourishment in it. It's just boredom evasion, but it makes you more bored. So that is really bad for writing. Just being as quiet as possible really. and as sort [00:20:00] of boring routine as possible.

I think that's what helps

Courtney: my, my memory of meeting you for the first time was at the Adelaide Writers Festival. And you generously, asked a question. So I was promoting my first book, the Burial, and you were sitting next to Jane, our publisher, and you said, what does transcendence mean to you in, in your writing? And I have no idea how I answered you, and it's a question that's actually lingered and it really lingers in my writing space. what is transcendence? I mean, I know it when I see it and I read it and I marvel at how that writer has, has earned it. And there's a moment in the weekend, actually, and I won't describe it because that would ruin it for your, people who haven't read it yet, but just to describe it generally, the characters I guess we understand the human limitations very acutely [00:21:00] by now, and there's a moment where they connect. They, they literally touch each other. They, they reach for each other. (Dog barks) Monty, it's my moment! We're talking transcendence. An elemental force picks them up and sets them down again and I was like, Charlotte, you've, you've done it. You've, you've earned it. Yeah. So I'm asking the question back to you. is that something, that you are consciously striving for in your writing, in your storytelling?

This thing of transcendence or does it have any meaning at all to you?

Charlotte: Yes, it does, I think I always want that. I want to, get some sense of transcendence into a book, and I guess the end is where, I don't know, sometimes I feel like, oh, is it too sort of hokey or something?
But I don't, I don't think it I don't feel like that when I [00:22:00] write it. And it's not to do with happy endings, it's to do with understanding. something, on another plane, I think, or reaching for something. You know, I am, an idealistic person, I think, and I believe in hope and I, I believe in sincerity as an artist, and I think it's quite hard to be openly sincere, because we sort of protect ourselves by being a bit cynical, I think. 

and I'm really over that in, art. I don't want any cynical art in my head, in my house, in my reading life. there's something poisonous about cynicism that we don't have time for. You know, we don't have time in our individual lives, but we don't have time as a, you know, humanity doesn't have time for that.

Years ago I edited a book Called the Writer's Room, which is interviews with writers that I did just like we are doing now. And I basically did that as a kind [00:23:00] of way of getting an excellent masterclass for myself from all these writers that I really admired.

Courtney: We all benefited. Thank you,

Charlotte: And Amanda Laurie was one of those writers and I was working on the natural way of things and she said, I always want a book to have,some kind of sense of messages from another realm. And that just hit me like a hammer. 
And I said, what do you mean? And she said, I hate a book. I hate naturalism. And I was like, what do you, what do you mean? And she said, if, if you're only talking about the the real material world, then. that's basically just tedious, you know? And, that she said, I always want to have a sense of the oceanic feeling she said messages from another realm.

And I have just kept that really close to my heart, I suppose, since then. I could suddenly see a way of doing that in the natural way of things of, of departing from realism, which that book is about a bunch of young women held captive in a kind of [00:24:00] middle of nowhere prison. It's very dark and kind of brutal material.

But the way for me to kind of lift away from the darkness and the brutality was to, to bring in a kind of surrealistic element or a slightly magic realism, I guess, element where, you know, a person might turn into an animal or, you know, there are revisions that may or may not be of something real I feel like that's where my writing changed for the better in allowing that kind of material in In and realizing that lots of of readers won't accept this. But I don't care. I, I want it. And you know, there were people saying in that book, there's an electric fence in the middle of nowhere. you know, that keeps them all in there. And I don't know if it was online or in a. Writer's Festival or something. Someone asked me about, well, how could the electric fence work?

I'm like, in my head, I'm like, you are not the reader for this book. Like, who gives a shit? It's justa statement that enables this world to operate in the way it operates. Of course, that wouldn't [00:25:00] work like that, but that kind of, preoccupation with could this really happen?

That's not what I'm interested in, So you need the confidence to go, I don't need to please that reader. you know, heaps of people hated that book. A lot of people loved it, but a lot of people hated it and still tell me to this day how much they hated it. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. and it sort of takes confidence to get to the point where you don't give a shit about certain kinds of reader.

Courtney: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte: And in fact, you really have to get to a point, I think this is like writer Nirvana, which you know, will never reach of, not wanting any readers. You know, that sort of sense of, I don't care if anyone likes this now, that's. Very hard and I, I'm sure I will never get there, but I feel this kind of thrill when I think of, of being like that, and that is the liberation of saying, what do I want? not, what [00:26:00] does a publisher want? Not what does a reader, what does the book club want it? You know? Good reads, no, never go there, . It's a very bad place for writers. it's really important to go your own way, you know, and it's hard and it's,lonely and it sets up. sort of big fears in you that are quite primal. I could never figure out why writing was sometimes so frightening.

Mm-hmm. , you know, there was so much fear involved. Doesn't make any sense. You know, if you talk to a normal person and say, I'm really terrified because I'm writing, and they're like, you are insane.

And they're kind of correct. But I have a wonderful. psychologist friend called Alison Manning, who years ago said to me, look, the greatest human need is to belong to a tribe. it's an evolutionary thing our deepest fear is being separated from the tribe. And if we feel that we are being ostracized or, or just rejected in any way, there's this like lizard brain part of us [00:27:00] that feels this as, life-threatening, because, to be separated from the group was life-threatening. You need to be a part of a group to survive. Being an artist is all about not being part of a group. It's all about stepping away from the group and having the courage to reveal how much you are separated from the group. of, once I understood that, it's like, that's why it's so scary. Mm-hmm. , And that is hard. Well, first of all, there's no guarantee that if you have absolute jurisdiction, anyone's going to care or like it or whatever.

But I've seen it time and time again where, and I think it's often the third book. I feel like this is where it happens, or a long time after the first book where you you go through a period of sort of disillusionment of, I think often this is the pattern and it was certainly the pattern with me. The first book comes out, nobody cares. Maybe you get a nice review, whatever it, you know, dies a [00:28:00] quick natural death. Second book, you think, right, that's not gonna happen again. I'm gonna make sure that people like this one so strive and strive and strive and, you know, produce a kind of fairly anxious kind of book. this is obviously talking about myself thinking, oh, this will, you know, do the things that that other one failed to do. Then that one fails to do it as well. I mean, my second book. You know, sold barely anything. Got a little bit of, short listing. Mm-hmm. prizey thing, which is another really bad trap, to think about. Anyway, then it died the same natural death, and then that's when you sort of think, what am I doing this for?

Then the third book, I feel like, Often people are like, well, fuck everybody. I'm just gonna write what I wanna write. No one gives a shit anyway, so what's the point in trying to please anybody, screw it. 

That's the book that then actually actually has something, you know, because you've made this kind of move into absolute jurisdiction.

You're not all the way there, but you've got a foot in that understanding. [00:29:00] And I think. , I don't know. You can't get to it sooner than you get to it. 

Courtney: Before we finish, where do you reach, when you're seeking inspiration or, or to be nourished in that, deep way? 

Charlotte: It's about voice. So I go to books not that they have the voice that I want for this book, but. Put me in a state where I can access the voice of my book. Kate Greenville talks about this in an excellent book, making stories edited by Sue Wolf and Kate Greenville. And she talks about, I think it was, Lillian's story she was writing and she said she'd read some Shakespeare or Jane Austin or maybe both and then the voice would come for her book, which was nothing like Shakespeare, Jane, but something about the tone or the mood or whatever. So I will often just go and reread, re re reread the, books that have somehow fueled the voice that I have for the work at the moment. there's a beautiful documentary, about Rosalie Gascoyne, there's clips of it on [00:30:00] YouTube. So Rosalie Gascoigne, a very famous visual artist who probably kind of really was the first major artist to do a lot of found objects of stuff. 

She's had very, very high standards, and she said, the artist must have absolute jurisdiction. And I love that. That just really. Strengthens my resolve. She had to respect it first and you have to be prepared to forego approval.

All those things that you worry about as an artist, as a writer, wanting love, wanting money, wanting acceptance, all the things you want. you know, they're natural and normal. But what you need is self-reliance and, and, to be self-respecting. So I just turn to any artist, I can find who, gives me that. Who reminds me of that.

Courtney: Charlotte Wood. You give me an o oceanic feeling. thank you for as always, so generously sharing your [00:31:00] lifelong discoveries gold. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Charlotte: Courtney. I've just loved our long, luxurious chat.

Courtney: Thank you. 

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